---The trouble is that you think you have time---
---Worry is the Interest, paid in advance, on a debt you may never owe---
---It's not what happens to you in life that is important ~ it's what you do with it ---

He turns his mind away from those phenomena, and having done so, inclines his mind to the property of deathlessness: 'This is peace, this is exquisite — the resolution of all fabrications; the relinquishment of all acquisitions; the ending of craving; dispassion; cessation; Unbinding.'
(Jhana Sutta - Thanissaro Bhikkhu translation)

"Happy Birthday to me, Happy birthday to me. Poor fellow, he doesn't realise he is one step closer to his grave!"
Paraphrased from Goenkaji, because I couldn't find the quote online anywhere.
And Happy Birthday!

Then,
saturated with joy,
you will put an end to suffering and stress.SN 9.11

Thank you all!
I am having a great day.
This morning I got three assignments out of the way. I have siblings, my daughter and mother-in-law arriving from interstate over the next 24 hours, so it should be a good weekend. We might even make it to Cradle Mountain for a walk around Dove Lake on Sunday. Weather permitting.
Then early next week I am off on another field trip - this time to Port Arthur Historic Site for four days.
I hope you are all having a great day too!
kind regards,

Ben

“No lists of things to be done. The day providential to itself. The hour. There is no later. This is later. All things of grace and beauty such that one holds them to one's heart have a common provenance in pain. Their birth in grief and ashes.”
- Cormac McCarthy, The Road

Learn this from the waters:
in mountain clefts and chasms,
loud gush the streamlets,
but great rivers flow silently.
- Sutta Nipata 3.725

Sounds like you will be having a great birthday weekend!!! It seems to me as we get older birthdays last for longer periods. You should be up to a week by now lol. May this birthday be the start of many, many, years of deepening insight and boundless metta.

Happy Birthday, Ben

*tiltbillings: the song, funny as all get out, perhaps a little sad, but oh so true!